Pope Francis: Loves women, at war with GOP

Commentary: Seven reasons the old-guy ruling class feels threatened

Pope Francis greets Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff during a meeting at the Vatican in February.

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Pope Francis is showing more and more signs of being a real game changer, aggressive, fast-moving. He’s giving women a bigger voice in an aging papal hierarchy where old men have ruled for centuries. No more. Remember, even before Francis’s manifesto was posted last Thanksgiving, a New York Times headline read, “Conservative U.S. Catholics feel left out of pope’s embrace.”

‘Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them.’
Pope Francis

There’s a new leader running the Catholic Church, a radical reformer moving fast, hinting at the liberalization of outdated rules on women’s rights. And, yes, this is bound to have a huge, though indirect, impact on women’s rights in America and women in all areas.

Yes, the Pope is giving women new power. And he’s doing it at a time when conservative American politicians are not only actively trying to put women back in their place with health care and reproductive rights, but also disenfranchising everyone who doesn’t fit the elite image of their threatened old-men rulership. So you know they must wish they could impeach this radical progressive leader. Are furious. Trapped. Can’t do anything — popes have dictatorial powers from on high.

The new pope is changing the rules of the game, not just for his 1.2 billion faithful in the Catholic Church but across politics worldwide. And it will have a ripple effect on American and global economics. Because he is a radical reformer, clearly hell-bent on charging ahead. New rules. New resentments for conservatives.

Pope Francis is a conservative’s worst nightmare

Pope Francis is on record as an anti-capitalist. He’s anti-inequality, wants more government policies favoring the poor, at a time when GOP budget czar Paul Ryan just keeps attacking the poor. The pontiff is against capitalism’s failed trickle-down theories. Against today’s global obsession with materialism, with growth economics and our excessive consumerism. He criticized capitalism’s “new and ruthless idolatry of money.” He also took the media to task as misguided in playing up a “two-point stock-market loss” while ignoring such news events as when “an elderly homeless person dies of exposure.”

Technology didn’t even escape the pope’s attack in his “Apostolic Exhortation.” Silicon Valley must have felt the sting when Francis blasted it for giving priority “to the outward, the immediate, the visible, the quick, the superficial and the provisional,” where “what is real gives way to appearances” and technology drives the “deterioration of cultural roots” in nations that are “economically advanced but ethically debilitated.”

Small wonder that conservatives like Paul Ryan, Bill O’Reilly, Chris Christy and Rush Limbaugh hate what he stands for ... because Pope Francis is driving a stake directly into the heart of the GOP’s capitalist theology. Remember, Francis delivered the ultimate pro-socialist attack on today’s Ayn Rand–Paul Ryan brand of conservatism: “Not to share one’s wealth with the poor is to steal from them.”

That puts Francis and his “officer corps” of 200 cardinals, 5,000 bishops, 450,000 priests and 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide — 78 million of them Americans — on a direct collision course with the GOP’s ultraconservative anti-poor budgets.

7 reasons old-men rulers feel threatened by women

A woman president? To clean up the mess conservatives are making? Yes, that’s the narrative. Seen as an attack on old-men rulers in our do-nothing, no-compromise, block-everything Congress dominated by a small group of myopic, austerity-obsessed Luddites, trapped in their 19th-century ideologies with teenager brains, controlling Washington, killing our economic growth, killing our superpower role, killing America’s future. So, yes, maybe it is time to replace them ... with adult women.

Gender research in behavioral economics, neuroscience and brain psychology confirms that women do think, feel and see the world different, and that affects how they value the economy. It’s a huge difference — women think long term. Men focus on the short term, myopic, aggressively gunning for big profits — before year-end, before quarterly earnings, before today’s closing bell.

Gender differences are summarized in many popular books, like 1992’s “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.” But the differences still baffle so many men, especially old male politicians. Deep down they’re little boys, feel threatened, feel their power slipping away.

So they fight back, not fully understanding why, in fear, holding on to the past, because their brains tell them old guys should rule. Get it? It is a guy thing. Paternalism. Patriarchy. Basic psychology. Old guys feel so threatened if they can’t get their guy — Jeb or Chris or Marco or Rand — elected, a woman could be in the White House till 2024. Yes, Dems in power for 16 long years. Ouch. That’d be a death blow to the egos of the old-guy rulers.

If women’s and men’s brains really are so different ... if women really do see something that men are missing ... if America’s male-dominated patriarchy can’t grasp the wave of changes coming in government ... then, given the mess our economy is in, America really could use lots more female energy, women strategists in Washington. Fast. New leaders, a woman like Hillary Clinton in the White House, more power players like Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill and the other elected women confronting the crusty old-men generals dominating the Pentagon.

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